Repetition Compulsion: 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' (1976)

Why was Clint Eastwood's revisionist western the only movie my late father would bother to re-watch?

I.

When I was a kid, my father generously took me to the movies nearly every weekend. Generous not merely because he was forking over money for tickets and concessions, but also on account of him having to drive 50 miles roundtrip from our movie theater-less small town to the nearest multiplex. For his troubles, he had to endure hours upon hours of the kind of shitty movie that appeals to pre-pubescent boys. I’m talking notoriously bad stuff like the maligned adaption of Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck (1986), the talking-horse comedy Hot to Trot (1988), and the incoherent Corey Haim/Corey Feldman body-swap romance Dream a Little Dream (1989). An exceedingly patient man, my dad.

But his patience had its limits. Early on, I noted that he often sprang up to leave before the movie was over. I don’t mean that he elected to skip the credits, as many “normies” do; no, he headed for the exit the second the central conflict of the movie resolved — and not just with shitty movies. When we saw Die Hard (1988), for instance, he was out of his seat before Hans Gruber hit the pavement. My dad had no patience for the denouement: if the bad guy is dead, the movie is over.

His peculiar pragmatism even extended to repeat viewings. Pops would often express bafflement if I were to rent a movie on VHS that we’d already seen on the big screen. “Why would you waste two hours on a movie when you already know what’s going to happen?” he’d ask. Whatever pleasures he took from watching movies was apparently exhausted the moment the outcome was no longer in question, and to re-watch a movie was at the expense of a potential maiden voyage with something new and unseen.

There was, however, one exception to this general rule. If The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) was on television, my father was watching it. Like many a kid who came up in the golden age of the western, he maintained a lifelong affinity for the genre. But despite my dad’s efforts, I never took to the western as a child. Later in my life, particularly while working on my doctorate in film studies, I grew to appreciate the genre, and I enjoyed talking with my dad about old favorites of his like Rio Bravo (1959), Shane (1953), and The Searchers (1956).

To my dad, these were all very good, perfectly enjoyable westerns — but only Josey Wales rose to the tier of masterpiece. I often probed him about why he held this particular movie in such esteem over the hundreds of other cowboy movies he’d absorbed over the decades. “Because it’s the best one,” he’d say in his characteristically quiet, unassuming way. Like the Eastwood archetype, my father was a man of few words. Suffice it to say, though, that if he were to carve his own movie Mt. Rushmore, it would consist of but one head, namely, this one:

Publicity still from The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). [Warner Bros.]

II.

My father died in 2022, on the day before Thanksgiving, after several years of worsening dementia. Though I loved him dearly and grieved his passing mightily, I was taken aback by my inability to weep for him, especially since I am quick to cry over movies, songs, books, the news… I think it may be that I had mourned him in dribs and drabs over the course of his slow decline that when he ultimately passed I had no tears left. Throughout his decline, the twinkle in his eye and his friendly disposition remained intact even as he grew more remote, more confused. One of the more devastating things I remember about that period is having a conversation with him seeing the exact moment in which he lost the plot and how bravely he tried to recover, to stick to the topic that had in that instant escaped him.

Thanksgiving is a deeply ironic timestamp for one’s father’s death, the reminders of his absence coinciding with a celebration of abundance. This year, as the holiday approached and my mind naturally started to gravitate towards his memory, I decided, as an act of communion, to watch The Outlaw Josey Wales for the first time in 30 some odd years. My goal: to see if I could detect what it was about this movie that so appealed to him, what made him return to it again and again.

III.

Let’s get synoptic. Clint Eastwood, who also directed, stars as Josey, a Missouri farmer in the waning days of the American Civil War whose wife and child are killed and his farm destroyed by a band of Union-sympathizing red legs. Josey sets about avenging his loved ones’ murders and becomes a fugitive in the process.

In that regard, Josey Wales is a western in the classic vein. With single-minded determination, our taciturn hero metes out justice by single-handedly dispatching dozens of armed men with just his two pistols and a preternatural knack for survival. Eastwood does Eastwood things, cutting an iconic figure against the wide anamorphic frame, all squinty eyes, raspy one-liners, and spitting tobacco juice on the brows of his victims.

But this description fails to account for the revisionist aspects of the film that work to critique or question the romantic myths of the classic western tradition. Most notably, Josey, the supposed loner, manages to accumulate an array of stray tagalongs at nearly every turn. He takes, first, an injured fellow bushwacker Jamie (Sam Bottoms) under his wing until the young man succumbs to his wounds. Josey next befriends a Cherokee elder (Chief Dan George), who suggests that the two follow the lead of some Confederate factions and flee to Mexico. Along the way, Josey frees a Navajo girl (Geraldine Keams) from her captivity to a bounty hunter tailing him, and she, too, joins the team. They next rescue an elderly free-stater named Grandma Sarah Turner (Paula Trueman) and her granddaughter Laura Lee (Sondra Locke) from a group of pillaging Comancheros. (Unsurprisingly, sparks fly between Laura Lee and Josey.) Meanwhile, Josey, at great risk to himself, enters a Comanche village to negotiate the release of two men who had worked for Grandma Turner’s son, now deceased.

So by the film’s conclusion we have the Confederate fugitive Wales and his ragtag band of stragglers (a Cherokee elder, a Navajo girl, a pair of pro-Union Kansans, and two of their dead relative’s workers) living communally, peacefully, in Mexico before they all ultimately take up arms against the very group of red legs who murdered Josey’s family. It’s quite the big tent, one where incongruities and prejudices are set to the side in favor of justice or self-preservation or indebtedness to one another.

IV.

It’s impossible to know which aspects of The Outlaw Josey Wales so enamored my father. Perhaps it was Josey’s exceptional skill with a pistol, wiping out his enemies like some proto-John Wick; or maybe it was the way the hero seems to bank his words for later use as witty zingers before killing off his enemies. E.g.:

But were it the latter — the general badassery — there a dozens of other characters within Eastwood’s filmography and throughout the western more generally that would fit the bill. William Munny, the protagonist of Unforgiven (1990), another of my dad’s favorites as well as Eastwood’s final word on the western, is every bit the steely and capable belligerent that Josey is.

And were it the film’s revisionism, he’d also have no shortage of candidates from which to chose. (What I wouldn’t give to know his thoughts on 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller now that I have the vocabulary to discuss it properly!) Perhaps it’s the humorous buddy cop vibes in which the movie traffics that appealed to him, or maybe he took a shine to its depiction of a utopian, patchwork family unit.

I never bothered to press my father on “Why Josey Wales?”, and now that he’s gone, I may never know. But what I do know is that this movie, despite his aversion to repetition, drew him back repeatedly. Going forward, I suspect it will for me as well. There is comfort to be had in ritual, and I think I may have found a new one for future Thanksgivings.

In memory of Sidney Evans Horton, Sr. (May 31, 1942 – November 23, 2022)

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